Lorenzo Veracini

Swinburne University of Technology · The Swinburne Institute for Social Research

Federated Australia was seen for a long time as a significant social ‘laboratory’. The Commonwealth itself was seen as an ‘experiment’. This widespread metaphor relied on a particular pattern of perception: the country was ‘new’ (it was not), and the country was allegedly isolated (it was not, at least not completely). Many believed that its social...

While the history and technology of cinema are considered for the purpose of achieving decolonial ends, this paper suggests that ‘classic’ cinema may be considered a quintessentially settler colonial medium. However, the moving image is now delivered in new ways and through new devices, and streaming has transformed global patterns of cinema produc...

Food and food cultures matter enormously to the settler colonial ‘situation’: a circumstance characterised by the domination of an exogenous collective that is determined to build a permanent home in the country of Indigenous peoples. As a settler colony reproduces in the place of an Indigenous society, food is crucial to its evolution because it i...

What are the implications of recovering settler colonialism as a mode of domination that fundamentally shaped Taiwan’s history? The article argues that this uncovering is crucial to understanding the formation of successive polities on the island of Taiwan, but this is not to say that a settler-colonial studies lens should replace a colonial one.

South Africa’s settler-colonial past is widely acknowledged. And yet, commonplace understandings of the post-apartheid era and a focus on the end of segregation make an appraisal of settler colonialism in present-day South Africa difficult and controversial. Nonetheless, we argue that an understanding of South Africa’s “settler-colonial present” is...

This article follows nineteenth century debates pitting US economists Henry Carey and Henry George on the one hand, and Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels on the other hand. Carey and George maintained that displacement and settler colonialism could be a response to contradictions and an alternative to revolution. Marx and, later, Engels restated a rev...

This paper develops two analogies in order to conceptualise endogeneity as a category of analysis. The first analogy compares Indigenous understandings of place and place-making and territorio as defined in Italian territorialist traditions. They are both locales endowed with a specific personality and agency: one is the home of Indigenous peoples...

This essay focuses on settler colonialism as a developing mode of domination with contemporary manifestations. It highlights the similarities between historical settler colonialism and a contemporary global order fundamentally characterized by a logic of elimination and containment. On the basis of this analogy, the essay outlines what is here unde...

This essay discusses the conflict in Israel-Palestine and its long-term evolution in the context of a settler colonial studies interpretive paradigm. It argues this analytical paradigm may offer valuable insights both in the interpretation of the historical evolution of the conflict and in the analysis of its current circumstances. The first sectio...

This paper offers an original interpretation of Garibaldi’s political style and imaginary. The aim is to account for Garibaldi’s sustained engagement with the possibility of displacement as an alternative to revolution. It begins in an afternoon on a remote small island between two oceans. Garibaldi was considering his options. When he returned to...

This paper reflects on the medieval and classical antecedents of modern colonialism. In its first section, it focuses on Pisa’s medieval experience in order to contribute to a genealogy of colonial imaginings and practice. Unable to expand inland and surrounded by hostile polities, Pisa amassed a number of colonial possessions during the eleventh a...

This article approaches Taiwan history through the optic of settler-colonial studies, a comparative scholarly field that has consolidated in recent years [see Wolfe, Patrick. (1999). Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology. London: Cassell; Elkins, Caroline, and Pedersen Susan (eds.). (2005). Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth...

This chapter focuses on a specific mode of domination and its contemporary manifestations. It outlines what is here defined as the global settler colonial present: a predicament fundamentally characterised by a logic of elimination and containment rather than exploitation. This appraisal of a developing dispensation is offered as a reminder of the...

Focusing on radical labour historian Ian Turner’s The Australian Dream (1968), this article reflects on the evolution of Australia’s settler colonial imagination. During a few crucial decades in the nineteenth century, colonial traditions were overcome by settler colonial ones. The former espoused a system where British rulers would paternally mana...

This article understands a recurring reference to a lack of a 'dense' past as one discursive feature related to a number of specific constraints typical of settler colonial ideological formations. The first section of the article outlines an approach to the historical consciousness of settler colonial political traditions. The second section focuse...

This article focuses on Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s theory of colonization, on Karl Marx’s response to it, and on the role that settler colonialism as a global phenomenon played in shaping their thought. Marx’s rejoinder to Wakefield’s interpretation of an episode in the early colonization of Western Australia, when servants had deserted a wealthy co...

Multiethnic parties or even stable electoral alliances are a rare breed in the postcolonial world. In Une mairie dans la France coloniale, Benoît Trépied attempts to chart and make sense of one such uncommon alliance over a tumultuous period in a complex colonial context. The Union Calédonienne (uc ) was ascendant in New Caledonian politics between...

The Settler Colonial Present explores the ways in which settler colonialism as a specific mode of domination informs the global present. It presents an argument regarding its extraordinary resilience and diffusion and reflects on the need to imagine its decolonisation.

Robert E. Goodin’s On Settling recently emphasised the current relevance of settlement. It opened with Hobbes’s denunciation of ‘constant striving’, and at first looked like a call for slowing down in a world that pushes us to constantly reach for more.1On Settling, however, is most definitely not a critique of current dispensations. On the contrar...

In November 2011 Science published a paper presenting research conducted by a team led by population geneticist Laurent Excoffier of the University of Montreal. This work repackaged in a genetics-inflected language a recurring tenet of settler colonial discourse, a point initially suggested by the apologists of the settler ‘transition’ of the ninet...

Mark Rifkin recently issued a powerful call to unravel a pervasive settler ‘common sense’.1 Rifkin convincingly alerts us to the unreflexive settler colonial ‘structures of feeling’ that ‘saturate’ quotidian life. Settler colonialism remains, to use Rifkin’s formulation, ‘vital in the ongoing performance of quotidian modes of inhabitance and selfho...

In a seminal 1998 book, an intervention that kick-started what with hindsight could be called the ‘settler colonial turn’, Patrick Wolfe concluded that settler ‘invasion is a structure not an event’.1 Countering the notion of a ‘post’ — the ‘post’ that had informed postcolonial studies as a scholarly endeavour since its inception, even if the exact...

Colonial processes mobilised peoples in unprecedented ways. Alfred W. Crosby began Ecological Imperialism by noting that ‘European emigrants and their descendants are all over the place, which requires explanation’.1 But while descendants of non-Europeans are also all over the place, the study of migrations and human displacements has focused prima...

Why was an apology for settler colonialism like Goodin’s issued now? The world that settler colonialism made is not being challenged by particularly successful decolonising attempts and the settler colonial present still goes without saying. I would like to point to two possible answers. On the one hand, we are now collectively facing what Australi...

This chapter focuses on the reasons why history-writing remains so controversial in the settler national historiographies. The author argues that embracing a historical methodology or rejecting it altogether is part of a dilemma that is specific to the settler colonial “situation”. In doing so, he claims that the structuring relational distinction...

This article considers the current relevance of settler colonial tropes, narratives and idioms by discussing the opening section of On Settling (2012), a recently published book authored by respected political scientist Robert E. Goodin. While Goodin argues that ‘settling’ should be considered a ‘normatively defensible practice’, my critique focuse...

In a necessarily selective way, this paper explores the historiographical evolution of ‘settler colonialism’ as a category of analysis during the second half of the twentieth century. It identifies three main passages in its development. At first (until the 1960s), ‘settlers’, ‘settlement’ and ‘colonisation’ are understood as entirely unrelated to...

This densely argued essay offers an original approach to the study of Israel-Palestine through the lens of colonial studies. The author’s argument rests, inter alia, on the distinction between colonialism, which succeeds by keeping colonizer and colonized separate, and settler colonialism, where ultimate success is achieved when the settlers are “i...

Cowboys and Aliens. Universal Pictures, 2011 (118 minutes)

settler colonial studies aims to contribute to the consolidation of a new scholarly field. This process requires that colonial and settler colonial phenomena be analytically disentangled. They have generally been seen either as entirely separate, or as different manifestations of colonialism at large. Neither stance, however, allows a proper apprai...

Colonial processes mobilize peoples in unprecedented ways. While the study of migrations and human displacements has focused primarily on movement across space and only marginally on the sovereign entitlements with which people travel, “settler” remains a term that often applies to any community that ends up permanently residing in a particular loc...

While its primary aim is to explore possibilities for new research, this article contends that suburban and settler colonial imaginaries are related. It suggests that an awareness of the settler colonial “situation” and its dynamics can help an original approach to the interpretation of suburban forms (and vice versa). References to the suburban “f...

AbstractA growing body of scholarship employs the concept of ‘automobility’ to understand the practices, meanings and values with which cars have become invested. Analysis of settler colonial phenomena has also recently cohered into a distinctive transnational research strand. This article aims to integrate the findings of these two previously unco...

This book offers a new account of the American experience from the colonial period to modern times, placing issues of race relations, immigration, and presidential power in the context of shifting notions of empire and citizenship. In the tradition of synthetic works that combine law, history, and political theory, the book challenges prevailing in...

District 9 and Avatar are extraordinarily alike: both released in 2009, they tell a very similar story (even if they frequently invert the value signs). One would think that the scriptwriters have collaborated in some way. The first section of this paper analyses comparatively the two movies and identifies their common interests and a multiplicity...

This essay contributes to interdisciplinary reflection on settler colonialism and decolonization by proposing an analysis of two characteristic traits of the ‘settler colonial situation’: isopolitics and deep colonizing. The first section outlines isopolitical relations as an alternative possibility to sustained colonial domination on the one hand,...

Settler colonialism has been resistant to decolonization. Some settler polities decolonized later, some tentatively, some not at all (Veracini 2007a). And yet, as underscored, for example, by the 2007 UN declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and by its careful assertion of an indigenous right to self-determination respectful of the sovere...

The expectation that every corner of the globe would eventually become embedded in an expanding network of colonial ties enjoyed widespread currency during the long nineteenth century. A global analysis of the imagined geographies of settler colonialism could perhaps start with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ 1848 remark that the ‘need of a constan...

A comprehensive body of historical and postcolonial literature highlights how the colonial situation is fundamentally premised on the sustained reproduction of a series of exclusive dichotomies (i.e., good and evil, civilised and primitive, culture and nature), the most essential being the one separating coloniser and colonised. In contrast, in thi...

In this chapter, I outline a special type of sovereign entitlement that is claimed by a specific class of settlers: those who have come to stay, those who will not return “home”.1 It is an animus manendi that distinguishes the settler from the other colonists — as the very word “settler” implies, it is the intention to stay (as opposed to the sojou...

In this chapter, I focus on the way settler perceive their predicament and on a number of paranoiac dispositions characterising the settler colonial situation. This chapter also explores the possibility of a Lacanian (imaginary-symbolic-real) interpretation of settler colonial phenomena. First, there is an imaginary spectacle, an ordered community...

The expectation that every corner of the globe would eventually become embedded in an expanding network of colonial ties enjoyed widespread currency during the long nineteenth century. A theoretical analysis of what is here defined as the settler colonial situation could perhaps start with Karl Marx and Friederich Engels’ remark that the “need of a...

Settler colonialism has been resistant to decolonisation. Some settler polities decolonised later, some tentatively, some not at all.1 And yet, as underscored, for example, by the 2007 UN declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and by its careful assertion of an indigenous right to self-determination that must be respectful of the sovereign...

This paper outlines a number of approaches to an analysis of settler colonial subjectivities, the exploration of a specific state of mind and the detection of a number of paranoiac dispositions in a particular set of political traditions. At the same time, this paper explores the possibility of a Lacanian (i.e. imaginary-symbolic-real) interpretati...

Settler Colonialism and the Construction of Colonial FijiConsistent with an interpretive tradition identifying Fiji as a constituent site in the evolution of colonial forms, this paper argues that Fiji's colonial history provides a privileged point from which to explore the divide separating colonial and settler colonial phenomena. While suggestive...

Most cabbies would confirm that 'Australia has little history'. This is remarkable; how can one explain this often repeated trope? While having 'little' history should be understood in the sense that Australia has a short chronology (as dialogically opposed to 'Old Europe', for example), this refrain could also be understood as a way of expressing...

While an extensive debate has recently addressed more contemporary contributions to historical scholarship, the historiographical background to Australia's History Wars has rarely been appraised. This article proposes an interpretative narrative of the evolution of Aboriginal history during the 1970s and 1980s. While before the late 1960s a systema...

This article compares two processes of historiographical redescription. Two themes appear central to each: the final acknowledgement of the dispossession of the Indigenous inhabitants—what can be defined as the ‘founding violence'—and the defective nature of the legitimacy of the institutions of the state until a settlement with the dispossessed is...

Patrick Collins. Goodbye Bussamarai: The Mandaranji Land War, Southern Queensland 1842–1852. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2002. 305 + xv pp. $34.00

Brigid Hains, The Ice and the Inland: Mawson, Flynn and the Myth of the Frontier, Melbourne University Press, 2002, pp 218, pb S49.95. ISBN 0522850367.

[http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/10033/20030126-0000/www.jcu.edu.au/aff/history/articles/veracini_muckle.htm] This paper proposes a comparative analysis of discourses of indigenous history as they emerge from three recently established institutions: the National Museum of Australia (NMA) in Canberra, Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington, and the Jean-Mari...

Clive Moore, Sunshine and Rainbows: The Development of Gay and Lesbian Culture in Queensland, St Lucia, University of Qld Press, 2001, pp 244, pb S29.95.Peter Spearritt, Sydney's Century: A History, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, 2000, 319 pp, hb $79.95.Patrick O'Farrell, The Irish in Australia, University of New South Wales Press, 20...